Acts of Man, Not God

Rampaging floods in India and Pakistan. A devastating drought in Africa. The disappearance of fish off the coast of Peru. These recent, widely reported phenomena all have something in common. Though they were triggered by nature, their magnitude was increased disastrously by man's trying to expand his food production without considering the ecological side effects.

On the Indian subcontinent, residents of the Himalayan foothills have been chopping down trees at a prodigious rate to get more cropland for the growing population. The deforestation was particularly apparent to Economist Lester R. Brown, an agricultural specialist with the Overseas Development Council in Washington, who has worked periodically in India for 20 years.

Brown found that the once forested areas in the foothills where the Indus, the Ganges and the other major river systems originate had been "heavily cleared." That brought disaster in August and September, when the subcontinent was hit by the heaviest monsoon rains in decades. "Upstream," Brown explains, "the forests that used to slow down and absorb water runoff were no longer there. The rate of runoff into rivers was therefore much faster." Thus rainfall that caused moderate flooding 20 years ago, this year inundated millions of acres of croplands in six Indian states and southern Pakistan.

Terrible Mistakes. In Africa, a five-year drought has parched the 2,600 mile-long "savannah belt," just south of the Sahara Desert. As a result, large portions of six African nations--Senegal, Mauritania, Upper Volta, Mali, Chad and Niger--now subsist mainly on international contributions of food (TIME, Sept. 3). Although man cannot be blamed for the lack of rain, a recent study by the U.S. Agency for International Development reports that the Africans' efforts to gain a better living from the potentially productive land have made a bad situation much worse.

Because the semiarid region is ecologically fragile, reports AID, "mistakes in the use of soil, water and vegetation are magnified." Trees have been cut down for fuel, savannah grass has been replaced by seasonal crops, and available ground water has been squandered. Most damaging of all, the inhabitants have allowed their huge herds of livestock to denude the land through overgrazing. These practices, combined with the drought, have killed off the natural vegetation and allowed the Sahara to creep southward--in some places, says AID, by "as much as 30 miles a year."

Peru's loss is in the sea, where the cold waters of the Peru (or Humboldt) Current once teemed with anchovies. Every year millions of tons of the sardine-like fish were caught and ground into fish meal, which was then sold abroad as a high-protein feed for livestock and poultry. About every seven years, though, the anchovy bonanza was interrupted for a few months when a mysterious flow of warm water overrode the cold current, causing the fish to disappear temporarily.

When the warm current returned late in 1971, however, it lingered on for more than a year. Result: the fish catch plummeted, and the Peruvian government banned most fishing last year to give the anchovies a chance to proliferate again. But when the fishermen were permitted to put out into the cold current again this spring, they came back to shore almost emptyhanded.

The virtual disappearance of the anchovies did not result entirely from the errant current, according to Fisheries Research Adviser C.P. Idyll. Writing in Scientific American, he places much of the blame on human greed. U.N. and Peruvian experts had long recommended that the fishing industry take no more than 10 million tons of anchovies a year; that catch would not prevent the fish population from reproducing itself annually. But in 1970 the fishermen caught a record 12 million tons, and almost 11 million in 1971. As a result, Idyll believes, the anchovy stocks are so depleted that they may take years to return to their original size--if they ever do.

Fortunately, there are solutions to these man-made disasters. India and Pakistan can, like China and Algeria, reforest their hills. The sub-Saharan nations of Africa can, with massive international help, copy the U.S.'s 1930s soil conservation program and reclaim their land. If the anchovies do return in great numbers, the Peruvians can strictly limit the yearly catch and still get fine harvests. But clearly, the first lesson is to understand--and respect--basic ecological realities. As Economist Lester Brown puts it: "If we are to get the food we need, we cannot put more stress on nature than she can stand."

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